Demonstrates why the concept of vagueness is both useful and unavoidable in human behaviour

Looks at challenges arising from this very human way of thinking and expression in various areas, including speech recognition and designing more human-seeming robots

Not Exactly

In Praise of Vagueness

Kees van Deemter

Description

Our daily lives are full of vagueness or fuzziness. When we describe someone as "tall," for example, it is as though there is a particular height beyond which a person can be considered "tall." In this stimulating book, Kees Van Deemter cuts across various disciplines--including artificial intelligence, logic, and computer science--to illuminate the nature and importance of vagueness. Van Deemter shows why vagueness is both unavoidable and useful, and he demonstrates how tempting--and how wrong--it often is to think in terms of black and white, instead of the richly graded spectrum of the world around us. Vagueness, the author argues, allows us to focus on what matters, leaving out irrelevant details, and adding texture to what would otherwise be unintelligible facts. The embrace of vagueness, however, comes at a price, for when degrees of grey are accepted, concepts like truth, belief, and proof lose their power, and we are banished from that paradise in which truth and falsity are the only possibilities.

Not Exactly

In Praise of Vagueness

Kees van Deemter

Table of Contents

ProloguePart 1: Vagueness, where one leasts expects it 1. Introduction: False Clarity2. Sex and similarity: on the Fiction of Species3. Measurements that Matter4. Identity and Gradual Change5. Vagueness in Numbers and MathsPart II: Theories of Vagueness 6. The Linguistics of Vagueness7. Reasoning with Vague Information8. Parrying a Paradox9. Degrees of TruthPart III: Working Models of Vagueness 10. Artificial Intelligence11. When to be Vague: Computers as Authors12. The Expulsion from Boole's ParadiseEpilogue: In the Antiques ShopEndnotesFurther ReadingBibliography

Not Exactly

In Praise of Vagueness

Kees van Deemter

Author Information

Kees van Deemter is Reader in Computing Science at the University of Aberdeen.